How We Grew Traffic to Ahrefs’ Blog by 1136% (and Got Thousands of Paying Customers)

I’d just finished writing (what I thought was) my best article to date.

Following countless hours researching, polishing my copy and fixing typos, it was perfect. All the fundamentals were covered. This had to work.

So, I hit publish. And… crickets.

A week later… still crickets.

OK, perhaps I’m exaggerating. That article did get a bit of traffic, a bunch of tweets and even a few email signups. But did it have any significant impact on the bottom line?

Nope.

Worst of all, this exact thing had been happening to me for six long years. My hard work just wasn’t paying off, and my attempts to figure out how a blog could help with business growth were verging on desperate.

2. Focus on topics with high business potential

Unless that traffic consists of people who are specifically looking to solve an issue that your business happens to be an almost-perfect solution to.

In other words, if you want your content to bring you customers, you need to write about things that are closely-related to your business.

Take a look at the topics of the articles that bring the most Google traffic to Ahrefs Blog:

Let’s say you Googled “how much traffic does X’s website get?”

Naturally, you click the first result — this post from the Ahrefs blog. It talks about the various methods you can use to estimate website traffic.

In “Part 2 — Organic Traffic Estimation Tools,” we mention Ahrefs.

Done.

We’re teaching people how Ahrefs’ can be a solution to a problem they’re ALREADY looking to solve, directly within our content.

Yes, we could publish content unrelated to Ahrefs that would get us a ton of traffic, as some companies do — but we would struggle to convert these visitors into paying customers; this tactic doesn’t make sense to us from a business perspective.

Instead, I assign a ‘business value’ score to all our article ideas:

“3” — our product is an irreplaceable solution for the problem;

“2” — our product helps quite a bit, but it’s not essential to solving the problem;

“1” — our product can only be mentioned fleetingly (mostly for “brand awareness,” rather than “sales pitch”);

“0” — there’s absolutely no way to mention our product.

We try only to cover topics that score 2–3 and never publish anything that scores zero.

You might be thinking: “But aren’t you being too salesy? Don’t you turn people away from your blog by talking about your product all the time?”

Funnily enough, I’ve never received such complaints from our blog readers.

Quite the opposite, in fact.

We would be doing our readers a disservice if we didn’t tell them how Ahrefs could solve the problem they’re struggling with.

And aside from the random people finding our articles on Google, we have thousands of paying customers who want to get the most out of our toolset. And these customers are our priority.

By publishing content related to the core functionality of our toolset, we’re educating them on how to use our products better, and get more value out of them.

Make sure you get your content in front of those who (a) are likely to find it useful, and (b) have the power to link.

And remember: the quality of your content plays a vital role in the success of such promotion strategies.

When you have amazing content, you don’t need to promote it that hard — it spreads like wildfire all by itself.

Back to you

Of course, there’s more to increasing blog traffic and creating a robust customer acquisition channel than the four concepts I’ve outlined above. But I firmly believe that they form the very foundation of your success.

It took me a few years to figure out how content marketing translates into business growth, mainly because there’s so much misinformation on the web.